Today the NHL is rolling out free stuff to keep you occupied.

NHL Live

Sometimes the NHL is a little bad at marketing, don’t know if you’ve noticed. They used to call this product Game Centre Live in Canada, and it was pretty notoriously terrible. They’ve rebranded it and integrated it (almost) into NHL.com, so it’s now got only one na... wait, I’m being told they still call this two different things. Okay, in America it’s NHL.TV and in Canada it’s NHLLive.com

It’s free to April 30.

You do need an account, and you have to make that account from an email address that you’ll verify it from. If you already have a Rogers or Sportsnet account in Canada or an NHL.com account in America, it should let you log in with that.  I’m not NHL support though! There’s a Canadian FAQ that tells you how to set it up for various devices.

What do you get?

Full replays with DVR features for all 2019-2020 games. You can just access them from any of the “Watch” links on NHL.com once you have an account. This schedule page starts you off on opening day.

Rogers GCL was crap because it was a flash app. They’ve converted to HTML5, and it streams really well in high definition and works in most browsers on most systems (even Linux).

Check out the Broadcasts button on a game, and you might get options for different commentary to listen to, and on some games, there is a “Multi-Cam” option. This gives you a dedicated overhead camera at each goalie as well as the main feed. If you want to obsess over goalie plays, this is ideal.

You can watch on mobile apps, Roku, Apple TV, Playstation, Chromecast, Xbox, Amazon Fire and Android TV as well as desktop.

NHL Pause Binge

Okay, remember what I said about marketing, because that’s the dumbest name. They don’t mean the binge is paused, they mean the NHL is, and now you binge on their content. Another way to refer to this is NHL Youtube Channel.

What do you get?

A lot of NHL content like Road to the Winter Classic and something called Men in Blazers. You also get Retro Recap, which starts off with this one:

Bob Cole, Cassie Campbell and Andrew Raycroft in goal! What more could you ask for?

There’s another one about an amazing comeback in a Leafs-Bruins game. Check that one out. I hope they put up a lot more of these, because they’re fun, long enough to give you a feel for the game, not so long you remember games get boring sometimes.

There’s also all the regular channel content, game highlight packages and other features.

Go forth and watch hockey. It’s an interesting experience to watch a game when you know the outcome, though. You see it totally differently. If you learn anything, let us know.